Amazon Just Closed Mechanical Turk After 21 Years

Keypoints

• Amazon shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30 after 21 years
• The platform launched in 2005 and once had more than 500,000 workers
• People did tiny online tasks like labeling data, transcribing audio and answering surveys
• Amazon stopped taking new customers on July 30
• Amazon has not said AI is the reason
• AWS still offers its own data labeling tool called SageMaker Ground Truth

Mechanical Turk was one of the internet's earliest marketplaces for small jobs. Companies posted tiny tasks that computers struggled with, and people around the world did them for a few cents each. Jeff Bezos once called it "artificial artificial intelligence."

The name comes from an 18th century chess machine that looked automated but secretly had a human hiding inside. That fits the platform well, since many AI tools still depend on human work behind the scenes.

Workers labeled images, checked data, moderated content and filled out surveys. At its peak the platform had more than 500,000 workers from over 190 countries.

Amazon said the closure came after an internal review. It did not say AI played a part. Still, the timing says a lot. A 2023 study found that up to 46% of workers were already using AI tools to finish their tasks. Newer companies that focus on training AI models have also taken over much of this kind of work.

Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the group Turkopticon, said the platform had been in decline for years. She also noted that some people relied on it as a flexible, full time income. The closure doesn't mean human data work is gone. It just means the business around it has moved elsewhere.